Candle Lighter Award

Moving on from the well-known fact that the world has stepped into year 2013 (we all know one day old resolutions don’t make us better people) let’s not waste space and talk about a certain book I came upon via my sister. Published in 2002 it received great praise and acclaim from writers and magazines such as TIME. My own view follows after the synopsis presented from the book below:

THE LOVELY BONES

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer.

This is Susie Salmon, speaking to us from heaven. It looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets. There are counsellors to help newcomers to adjust, and friends to room with. Everything she wants appears as soon as she thinks of it- except the thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on earth.

Book cover

My take:

Some stories start with death and some end with it. This story starts, ends, dwells, picks apart and ultimately tries to understand what death is and what goes on after a person dies. Not in the sense of what happens to the soul etc. But it defines death in terms of living people and what they go through to come to terms with it, if there is such a thing as coming to terms with death.

At the start, Susie is murdered very very brutally, so much so that the method would benefit a horror story more than a novel, but this proves to be the very showcase of the authors skill; for she speaks about the death and what went on before, during and after with a remarkably simplistic approach and dialogue.

The story deals with Susie watching the earth and all of her loved ones from high in heaven, while her family, friends and neighbours try to bring normalcy into their lives. She watches as people she had not held close during her life reel back in shock at her death and never truly recover from it. Her high school crush, the girl she once spoken to, her younger brother and sister, the grandmother she had never really liked or understood during her time on earth all are deeply affected by her death and they move on in their own ways.

Her siblings grow up, fall in love, do those things she had never had a chance to do in her life and she sorely wishes to be back on earth and experience those for herself. She knows has to move on and start living in heaven where she now belongs but all she can do is sit and watch earth, not unlike her father whose life is put on hold to search for justice for her daughter. She thinks of her childhood, all those small incidents she never took note of but how they were signs for what was happening to her family now.

Anyone who likes fiction, emotional thrillers (if that is even a genre) should give this a try.

People who tend to dislike books dealing with sexual assault, family ties, relationships and such should steer clear.

Except for a certain part where Susie enters the world again via a rather eccentric route (to say the least), I would say this book was a good read for me and that I enjoyed it. What I liked the most was the fact that the author lets the reader figure out the deeper details by themselves and I like not having everything underlined and overstated.

Some time back (quite a long while actually) I decided to post some stories from the famous book teaching morals to young minds: “Aesop’s Fables”. Although this is just the second being posted, rest assured, there will be more. 🙂

Enjoy! 🙂

THE THIEF AND HIS MOTHER

A schoolboy stole a hornbook from one of his schoolmates and brought it home to his mother. Instead of punishing him, she encouraged him and was proud of his deed. In the course of time, the boy, now a grown man, began to steal things of greater value until he was finally caught in the act. Soon thereafter he was tried and sentenced to death. As he was being led toward the place of execution, he noticed his mother in the crowd standing along the way. She was wailing and beating her breast, and he begged the officers for permission to whisper a few words in her ear. When she quickly drew near and placed her ear to her son’s lips, he seized the lobe of it tightly between his teeth and bit it off. Immediately she shrieked, and the crowd joined her in scolding the unnatural son, as if his former evil ways had not been enough. Now he had gone a step further by committing this impious deed against his mother. However, he responded, “It’s she who’s the cause of my ruin! If she had given me a sound flogging when I stole my schoolmate’s hornbook and brought it to her, I would never have grown so wicked and come to this untimely end.”

“The Aleph was about two or three centimetres in diameter, but all of cosmic space was there, with no dimunition in size. Each thing was infinite, because I could clearly see it from every point on the universe.” – Jorge Luis Borges, “The Alpeh

Hello everyone,

Let’s start off this post by accepting the bare fact yet again, of just how lazy I am, just how faithful towards my procrastination standards and just how much I take my blog for granted. Having berated myself publicly, I would now like to redeem myself by telling my all-too-active conscious that most probably, I’m the only one following up on my blog and since there are as such no regular, religiously following readers to speak of, let’s save on the electronic space available (not that it needs any saving) and just get on with the review and assume no time has passed at all in the middle of my last post ages back and this one today.

Funny that we should come onto the topic of “time” and how I’m assuming here that “time has not passed”, this being one of the recurring themes of Paulo’s latest book ‘Aleph’. Let’s look at the synopsis:

“The Aleph is an encounter with our fears and our shortcomings – a search for love and forgiveness, and the courage to confront the inevitable challenges of life.

Each end gives us the opportunity for a rebirth.

Aleph marks a return to Paulo Coelho’s beginnings. Facing a grave crisis of faith, and seeking a path of spiritual renewal and growth, Paulo decides to start over: to travel, to experiment and to reconnect with people and the world. On his journey through Europe, Africa, and Asia, he will again meet Hilal – the woman he loved 500 years before – and this encounter will initiate a mystical voyage through time and space, through past and present, in search of an opportunity to rewrite his own destiny.

Page count: 300

My take: Ah. Now where does one begin to talk about such a book which expands across so many themes: reclaiming one’s lost kingdom, finding peace within oneself, past lives, reincarnations, forgiveness… I could go on for a couple of lines. Also, Paulo is someone MOST of readers have heard of, not to mention the millions of people following his advice and his paths to make their lives better.

As always, I’ll try to keep my views as respectful as I can and only talk honestly about how “I” find it.

I’ve read quite a few and loved some (The Alchemist, Brida, The Zahir) of Paulo’s work but this is certainly not one of them. Firstly, the book has TOO many themes I feel. The most dominant one is about Paulo’s past life and how he wronged some people in his previous incarnation and wants to set things right in this one, and live peacefully in all the other reincarnations he is going to have. Other themes somehow interfere with this central one and provide too many breaks from the main “river”-central theme, forming rivulets and you tend to find yourself wondering how we came to be drifting in this direction when the book isn’t even about it.

The start of the book was quite promising and my favourite bit because it comes across as something everyone can easily relate to. You learn so many things in life, so many words of wisdom touch you, make you learn about life, love, suffering, redemption..but as life goes on we tend to forget those teachings, those words mean lesser and lesser to us and we find ourselves right at the start. Back to square one. Because all those things which gave us profound meanings now meaning next to nothing and our spiritual growth has stopped and we are stagnating. Paulo starts off with a feeling of irritation and frustration at his incapability to grow and he wants to set things in motion once more. His spiritual teacher guides him and thus begins his journey- literal and figurative.

Paulo himself may have reset his life, overcome his past and so on, but I don’t think the book has anything to give to the reader on a personal level. Even the inspiration usually found in Paulo’s work is missing from this one. It feels as if the entire story and journey is tailor-made for only him and we have nothing to gain from his experience.

I do not believe in reincarnations, past lives and the such and so the main theme lacks all attraction for me. If even a person were to believe in it, they wouldn’t really have any help in it from this book. He strictly advises against the use of the practices he performs to get in touch with his past. The woman concerned in the plot, Hilal, comes across as a childish, arrogant woman refusing to deal with life just as everyone else is, the best way they can think of, and one does not relate to her neither feels any sympathy, just irritation at her attention-seeking antics.

Overall, I was pretty disappointed and found really nothing good in this one. Paulo himself comes across as someone getting all too irritated and lost over small things. It feels as if this book was published just so something or the other would come out of the long time he spent on the Trans-Siberian Railway, not as a work of true inspiration.

A last minute note. At one point, Paulo quotes 2 separate verses from the Holy Quran and he interprets these as indicators in Islam showing that reincarnations are true and that we live and die and live again and again. I would like to set this right and strictly condemn the translating of Quranic verses to mean anything we would like them to mean. As Muslims, we beleive there are meanings of the Quran we understand and many many many other meanings in the Quran which we cannot possibly comprehend and which are known only to Allah. Islam has told us quite clearly that this life on Earth is a one-time happening and after that we go to Allah, not back to this Earth. I hope Paulo Coelho won’t be interpreting Quran completely wrongly again in the future and he should rather stick to the correct interpretations he does when he uses the teachings of Islam themselves.

Hoping the next one would be good.

You may like it if:

You are an avid follower of PauloCoelho and usually love all his work.

We can all try saying that we have no regrets. That whatever happened was somehow “for the best” and that “in the bigger picture” and “in the long run” we are better off even after having done things one would term as regrets. We can say it with conviction, with humility and also quietly, but I doubt if we ever really mean it. Like really really mean it.
Try saying this:

“No, I do not have any regrets. I believe that everything happens for a reason. Sure I’ve done things that weren’t very good, but doing all those things, right and wrong, has made me the person I am today. And I’m proud of what I am today. So no, I do not have regrets and I wouldn’t like to significantly change something about my past.”

Now look at what you’ve just said. At all those words and the meanings they hold. Doesn’t one event come up like a lifebuoy on the ocean of your mind, instantly claiming attention and ridiculing what you’ve just read?

I think we all have regrets, we all have those little annoying events in our life which stick out like sore thumbs; reminding us of our bad decisions. Some of us let them overpower us, let them decide the course our lives would take. Some of us forget that they ever happened and decide to live our lives free of their haunting shadows. And still, some acknowledge their presence, repent their existence but in no way do they let them change their tomorrow.

The lesson I wish I had learned earlier in my life is a very basic one, but one which I think many of us suffer throughout our life: I wish I had recognized my true worth earlier in life and not accepted any less than what I deserved.

Self-worth is something which is continuously under attack from outsiders. We literally need to take up arms, and retaliate when it becomes necessary. Under no condition should we take abuse and humiliation over the things that make us different, that define us. We shouldn’t take less than what we deserve,and even if we are forced to, we should do everything in our might to change it. Because once self-worth is gone, it rarely ever comes back.

Hmm…I kinda don’t like the greeting my posts have. It’s like I’m a presenter on some monumental stage and have a million people staring at me..uh. Not happening. Anyway!

So on the first day of 2012 (It’s so creepy, writing 2012) I went and bought myself 3 new books, out of one I’m going to review here. I read it in about 3-3.5 hours flat which I think says a lot about how interesting it was. But as lazy as I am (VERY) it took me a while to get this post together and press ‘Publish’. Here is a shot I took of the back cover and some pages from the book because I wanted to share all the artwork included in the book with you guys. There’s at least one illustration per page for the whole book. And after that I get to speak my mind about this book. 🙂 Have fun! Oh and also, I’m sorry the angle of the camera and everything is kinda clumsy, hope to get better someday 😀

Images from the book:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Book 1)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Back cover)

Illustrations inside the book

My take: THIS is the kind of book that I would sit down and read in one go. Not because of how thrilling it is but because of the wonderful way in which it is written which doesn’t make the writer feel as if they are on a past-paced journey towards a climax, but instead takes them from page to page laughing out loud and thoroughly interested with what was going to happen next to the character. The book is the first one in a series of six (I will be sure to follow them all) and is narrated by Greg Heffley, a sarcastic, wise-cracking “wimpy kid” living his oh-so-troubled life in middle school with his best friend Rowley who is an innocent friend, not at all “cool” according to the standard of the school. Greg is one who continually tries to direct away the bullying and such which is part of middle school and rise to higher echelons of popularity.

The book comprises of 217 pages and I was laughing out loud at more than half of them. The narrative is full of sarcasm and irony and one can easily relate to the middle-school experience. The illustrations really bring the punchline in many jokes and are a great way to make the reading experience richer. From being acutely embarrassed of the nickname “Bubby”which his little brother gave to him, to being caught and ridiculed doing something silly by his older brother Rodrick, Greg is something of a magnet to hilarious situations. His high ideas to attain wealth and fame get him more trouble and get more laughs out of the reader.

A lot of people ask of how to become readers and get into the habit of reading regularly, and I advise them to start with something like this: a light, hilarious book to keep them entertained and show them what a book brings to the reader.

As cheesy and typical as this may seem (why does everything I have to say sound so darn cliched?! :@) I learned first-hand to literally leave alone the things I couldn’t get and embrace what I could have. I’ve had to make hard decisions relating my career and other things in 2011 and I just trusted God and jumped in with both feet. And it has paid off. I have wonderful thoughts of 2011 and even better hopes for 2012. 🙂